The companies said the alliance would focus on large-scale integrated circuits - the chips typically used in digital consumer products like mobile phones and game consoles.

Professionals typically design such large-scale circuits using a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL.

He said he often has trouble drawing parallels between his early invention and today's very large-scale integrated circuits.

Advances in large-scale integrated circuits permitted the introduction of computer control.

"There's an analogy here to electronic large-scale integrated circuits," he said.

VLSI stands for very large-scale integrated circuits, the most complex type of circuit.

The DSP1 started in 1977 with a Bell Labs study that recommended creating a large-scale integrated circuit for digital signal processing.

Very large-scale integrated circuits can involve more than a million laser-drilled holes, leading to a traveling salesman problem of more than a million "cities."

Before the advent of large-scale integrated circuits, key systems were typically composed of electromechanical components (relays) as were larger telephone switching systems.

Before the development of large-scale integrated circuits the control electronics would have been prohibitively costly.